The Function of Poetry in the Modern World: A Case Study of Walt Whitman and Audre Lorde’s Poems (original) (raw)
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The Politics of Form and Poetics of Identity in Postwar American Poetry
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, 2018
Scholarship on postwar poetry in the US has been deeply structured by a taxonomic distinction between what has been deemed an “expressive” poetics of racial, sexual, and gender identity and an avant-garde or experimental discourse of formal innovation, autonomy, or difficulty. Distinct formal strategies have been tied, in turn, to specific social groups and to a New Left and post-New Left division between antiracist and anticapitalist politics in particular. The recoding of this division as a generic distinction between divergent formal strategies, we argue, reinforces an artificial separation between poetic engagements with race and class as contested social locations in contemporary US poetry. We turn to the work of Audre Lorde, and reread one of Lorde’s most widely anthologized poems, “Coal,” for how it complicates the antinomic opposition between “expressive” and experimental writing that has governed the study of postwar US poetics. At the same time the poem offers a potential model to help us rethink the race/class problematic more broadly. How the poem imagines integral and comparative processes of racial, gender, and class formation, we contend, anticipates contemporary debates over intersectional and Marxist feminist social reproduction theory and opens onto critical horizons beyond the antinomies of postwar US poetics.
Poetry is Not a Country Club: Reflecting on "The Change"
Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, 2017
In recent years, Black poets and other poets of color have increasingly won many of the most prestigious prizes and awards within the majority and historically white field of US poetry. This article traces the interventions (writing, activism, and institution building) that have resulted in this "change." Rather than understanding the racial politics of poetry as an endlessly revolving door of scandals, or simply as a contest over prizes and economies of prestige, this article attends to the relationship between the world of poetry and the history of social movements, an exchange often mediated through the work of writers’ collectives. In particular, this article delineates how the interventions of Black poets and other poets of color (both individually and collectively) have shifted the world of poetry, while at the same time mirroring, connecting with, and speaking back to broader movements that seek to transform the world writ large.
A History of African American Poetry Chapter 1 Excerpt .pdf
A History of African American Poetry, 2019
African American poetry is as old as America itself, yet this touchstone of American identity is often overlooked. In this critical history of African American poetry, from its origins in the transatlantic slave trade, to present day hip-hop, Lauri Ramey traces African American poetry from slave songs to today's award-winning poets. Covering a wide range of styles and forms, canonical figures like Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) and Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) are brought side by side with lesser known poets who explored diverse paths of bold originality. Calling for a revised and expanded canon, Ramey shows how some poems were suppressed while others were lauded, while also examining the role of music, women, innovation, and art as political action in African American poetry. Conceiving of a new canon reveals the influential role of African American poetry in defining and reflecting the United States at all points in the nation's history.
I, too, sing America: three centuries of African-American poetry
1998
Powerful and diverse, this unique collection of African American poetry spans three centuries of writing in America. Poets bare their souls, speak their minds, trace their roots, and proclaim their dreams in the thirtysix poems compiled here. From lamentations to celebrations, the poems of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Gwendolyn Brooks, among others, reveal the ironies of black America, juxtaposing themes of resistance and reconciliation, hope and despair. Eminent scholar Catherine Clinton further illuminates these poems through brief biographies of the poets and notes on the text. The result is an authoritative introduction to twenty-five of America's best poets. Prizewinning artist Stephen Alcorn lends his own artistic vision and passion to the collection, providing stunning visual interpretations of each poem. Together they create a stirring tribute to these great poets.
The Issue of Race in Post-Colonial African American Poetry
Opción: Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, 2018
With studying of selected poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, the researcher aims to investigate the issue of race in Post-Colonial African American poetry via comparative-typological approaches. Brooks tries to depict the social inequality and the subordination of her people that has happened during the sixties of the twentieth century. As a result, Brooks' poetry was an attempt to forcefully encourage the blacks to be inspired by their heritage to attain their principal role in the society. As a conclusion, Brooks places emphasis on the humanistic love too being one of the principal requirements to a happy and brotherly life.
A History of American Poetry: Contexts-Developments-Readings. Eds. Oliver Scheiding, René Dietrich, Clemens Spahr. Trier: WVT, 2015.
This handbook answers the need for fresh and informative readings of canonical and non-canonical poems. The thirty-one chapters engage revisionary trends in poetry scholarship. They unfold a critical history of American poetry that challenges conventional interpretations and provide insightful new readings of well-known poems and writers as well as introductions to poets and texts that may be more unfamiliar. Each chapter focuses on two poets set into dialogue with each other, presenting paired readings of one representative text from each author. In addition to a number of familiar texts and names that are necessary for students to understand basic developments in American poetry, the handbook offers chapters on multilingual colonial poetry, nineteenth-century Native American poetry, and contemporary experimental poetry. The paired readings of poems in each chapter also invite interconnected lessons that make readers compare, for example, the communal conventions of colonial poetry to the collective poetics of contemporary performance poetry. The handbook encourages readings across and against literary periods, while annotated paired readings and additional reading suggestions should inspire students to analyze poems as particular sites of historical and political meaning. Being both a manual in terms of current theoretical directions in literary studies and a guide to practical criticism, A History of American Poetry helps students to further explore the diversity and multiple poetic traditions that make up American poetry in its intersections with historical contexts and other literatures.
'You Asked Me to Sing Then You Seemed Not to Hear': African American Poetry since 1945
American Poetry Since 1945, ed. Eleanor Spencer-Regan, 2017
Rita Dove raised the concern: 'We all understand the dangers of being put into one little box'. 1 From its origins, African American poetry has been more diverse and innovative than is commonly realized. In the past and present, a persistent bind for this genre has been the criterion of 'authenticity', which has relegated it to narrow stereotypes of how African American poetry should look, sound, and operate. The period from the end of WWII to the present has been an explosive time of poetic experimentation that extends the innovations of Modernism into the twenty-first century. This expanding body of new poetic styles equally builds on the genre's origins. Rather than signaling a departure or new direction, such exploratory and diverse practices are based on long-present trends, goals, and characteristics. These developments are an invitation to reexamine the canon, to speculate on why such dynamic, even difficult, writing has been systematically excluded, and to redraw the picture for a more accurate and richer view of the full range of African American poetry. Exposure to overlooked, under-appreciated, and forgotten voices produces a radically transformed perspective of the scope of recent African American poetry. When examined through the prospect of innovation, a hidden canon is revealed, putting to rest those stereotypes that